Serious problems on crime, environment etc. exist today which can only be addressed successfully on an international scale. This is only possible if humans worldwide share many values of right and wrong. Protagoras (481BC) would have denied this downright. He claimed that the existence of universal valid truths and moral values as well as the capacity to find them is impossible. This view, for not exactly the same reasons, is also prevalent today. For Protagoras and other Sophists who focussed rather on ethics, arete = virtue was a wide concept. They claimed that they could teach a more virtuous life. This in a time when traditional ethical norms for Athenians collapsed: universal norms of good and right, and its religious foundations, were lost. It had no general validity. Nothing was put in its place. Protagoras' sceptical approach was derived from his epistemological approach. In place was individual moral relativism: what is good for me, is good for me. Callicles claimed eventually that right is the right of the strongest. The possibility of foundations was denied (e.g. religious foundations) - about the gods we can say nothing. The foundations are human devices depending on subjective and contingent conditions. Today several value systems, each with its own norms as to good and bad, is well known. We have no quick fix recipes and answers for serious worldwide problems like crime (terrorism, drugs, enslaving of children, etc), animal ethics, environment, cloning, and euthanasia. For the solving of these, worldwide action is logical. But it is hardly possible if common values are absent. To what will we appeal to combat crime like terrorism? Is this possible or shall we have to fall back on Protagoras' dictum of individual moral relativism? The possibility of a common shared foundation for morality had been seriously challenged in ethics. This in the name of antifoundationalism. Like Protagoras, it is denied that there can be absolutely secure insights grounding our moral (and epistemological) knowledge. Like Protagoras, it is argued that insight is rather based on purely subjective and contingent experience. I also argue that a universal absolute secure foundation for morality is unlikely. However, I argue that a limited common foundation is quite possible. Substratums in an infinite regress (foundationalism) can be avoided. However, the term "foundation" can be used without a foundationalist connotation. I argue for foundations in a limited sense as providing good reasons for accepting a conclusion. This involves a limited basis of universally accepted shared values. These shared values can be known directly by any rational being.
